To tell the truth, college coaches spin the rhetoric

• Kentucky's Joker Phillips needs to be on something other than friendly terms with AD
• Auburn's Gene Chizik: Supremely self-confident?
• Texas' Mack Brown should be questioning everything

As a general rule, coaches and athletics directors should not be friends.

A good working relationship? Sure. A healthy respect for one another? Great. Ability to communicate on all major issues? Very important. But friends?

That's not something you hear coaches say very often, and with good reason. A coach's job is to prepare his team and win games. An athletic director's job is to give the coach the resources he needs to compete in his conference and, if necessary, evaluate how good a job is being done with those resources. There is a natural push-and-pull inherent in those two roles. A coach and athletics director need to be on the same page with their vision for the program, but the relationship doesn't work if they are not challenging each other.

And at some point, either a coach will leave for another job or an athletics director will have to fire him.

This makes friendship hard. And this is also why Kentucky coach Joker Phillips' news conference Monday turned cringe-worthy when he was asked about his recent communication with athletics director Mitch Barnhart.

"We talk a couple times a week," Phillips said. "It's just a small talk. It's nothing -- you know, he's been very encouraging and nothing what you want to get at.

"One thing Mitch and I, we're friends, and that's more important to me than anything on the business side. We are friends. And I can tell you this: There's not a lot of people out there that can say they are friends. There's not a lot. One of the things I do cherish and appreciate is our friendship."

That's an unfortunate answer for several reasons. Everybody knows Phillips, whose teams is 1-6 and totally uncompetitive in the SEC, is unlikely to be back next season unless he can turn around the season. Phillips needs to be fighting for his job right now, not talking about his personal relationship with Barnhart because that's not going to matter much in the final calculus. Phillips is going to keep or lose his job on merit, and talking about friendship makes him sound like he's already resigned to his fate: "Hey, it's OK if he fires me because our friendship is more important than wins and losses!" Not what you want to hear if you're a Kentucky fan.

It also brings up a larger issue with the Kentucky program. If Kentucky wants to win, it needs to upgrade facilities and devote more resources to the program, period, to get on a level playing field with the SEC. It will take a coach demanding that of Barnhart the same way John Calipari does. You can't do that with a "friend."

So while it's nice to know Phillips has a positive feeling toward Barnhart, it won't mean much when Kentucky is looking for a new coach this December.

And with that, let's take a look at who else was spinning in this week's Tuesday Truth Squad.

Gary Patterson, TCU, on playing games against Texas schools:

"If you ask if I could win a game between Iowa State or Baylor, I would say Baylor. If you asked me the same thing about Iowa State and Texas Tech, I would say Texas Tech. We know Baylor. We know the kids at Texas Tech, and there are bragging rights on the line. With Iowa State, you have to learn what kind of football team they are."

Can anyone lose a football game these days without some sort of extenuating circumstance or excuse? Patterson has been known to say some weird stuff in newss conference settings (accusing a Boise State reporter of spying on his practice, declaring Southern Methodist's June Jones persona non grata for some very milquetoast comments after a game last November, etc.), but this one is just ridiculous.

Patterson's larger point makes some sense; that it's easier for TCU's players, who are playing their first year in the Big 12, to get up for games against in-state schools. But a couple weeks removed from getting spanked at Iowa State, it sounds like an excuse — and a bad one, at that.

This isn't very complicated. The moment TCU lost quarterback Casey Pachall, who withdrew from school that week to enter a substance abuse rehab program, its chances of beating Iowa State went from decent to very shaky. Combine that with the fact Iowa State is a pretty good team, and it's no surprise TCU lost 37-23.

So for Patterson to suggest TCU won the Baylor game simply because players cared more about beating an in-state school — as opposed to, maybe, the fact that Iowa State is a better team than Baylor — doesn't seem particularly believable. And it borders on sour grapes, especially when TCU seemed to do pretty well getting up for games in the Mountain West, a league where it had no geographic ties or true rivalries.

Gene Chizik, on former Auburn coach Pat Dye's criticisms of the program on the Paul Finebaum Radio Show:

"Coach Dye is a tremendous football coach, was a tremendous football coach and I have a lot of respect for Coach Dye, without question. I can't spend a lot of time and energy in deliberation about what somebody said, whether it was Coach Dye or an alum from 1968 that nobody knows; I just don't have an opinion on that. My day when I walk through the door consists of my coaches and my players and the direction we're headed. What makes college football great is that, you know what, there's people on the radio, people on TV that can say and do whatever they want and hey, that's great. But if I concern myself with all of that, that would suck the energy and life out of me trying to do a job here where I have to stay concentrated on one thing: Trying to get my coaches and players on the path to improvement. I'm not really sure what you're talking about, but I can't spend my time one way or the other with that type of stuff."

After watching Chizik's news conference Tuesday, it's clear he's taking the George Costanza approach to speculation about his job security. Remember that episode when George got fired, then showed up to work the next day like nothing's wrong? That's Chizik. The man is supremely self-confident or totally delusional.

Dye went on Finebaum — which, for the uninitiated, is pretty much the sports talk show of record in the state of Alabama — and said many of Auburn's problems weren't fixable and he'd be surprised if the Tigers won an SEC game this year. (They are seven-point underdogs to Vanderbilt this weekend.)

Given Dye's status as the emeritus voice of all things Auburn, this can only be seen as fanning the flames – and Chizik has every right to be furious about it. But Chizik's tactic is to run the other way and pretend that A) He doesn't know what Dye said, and B) It doesn't matter who said it because the great thing about college football is everybody has an opinion.

For someone in Chizik's situation, with his program in full-blown crisis mode, that's laughable. When coaches say they don't know what people say about them, it's not true 95% of the time. Dye's comments rippled through the Auburn community Monday, and yes, it does matter that it was him and not some anonymous alum from 1968.

This is a tough situation, and Chizik deserves some credit for answering questions and not hiding from the media, which is starting to ask tough questions. But at some point, he needs to acknowledge the firestorm swirling around him because, whether it's fair or not, public opinion is going to determine in part whether or not Auburn makes a coaching change.

Or maybe Chizik, knowing he's either going to keep his job or get that nice $7.5 million buyout, simply doesn't care.

Mack Brown, Texas, on whether the 63-21 loss to Oklahoma makes him question anything about the program:

"No, I think it makes me stronger in my belief. Because when you get kicked in the face like that, you're competitive and you're determined to make sure that you don't let that happen again and get it back."

The problem for Brown is this runs deeper than just one game. If he's not questioning everything at this point, he should be.

At various moments this year, Texas has seemed like a program making progress. But the bottom line is that Oklahoma is light years ahead of the Longhorns, and Saturday wasn't just one bad game. In the same news conference, Brown touted that Texas has won four of the last eight against the Sooners, but even the most ardent Longhorns supporter would acknowledge spin doesn't get more egregious than that. If Texas is going to measure itself against Oklahoma, losing three years in a row should tell you exactly where you stand. And that whatever you've been doing isn't working.

With all of Texas' advantages, it should not be middle-of-the-pack in the Big 12. Changes have to be made, whether they are philosophical or in personnel. What changes? That's hard to pinpoint, but if Brown is going to continue coaching there he needs to figure it out quickly. It sounds nice to say you're stronger than ever in your belief about what you're doing, but who believes in something that produced a 42-point loss to your biggest rival?